A shameful deed has been done in Israel

“A shameful deed has been done in Israel” is a proposed placard slogan that gives public form to a father’s anguish over being separated from his daughter. Its force lies in the movement from private grief to accusation: he wants the child returned, but also imagines making the alleged wrong visible to the community and naming it as a disgrace committed in Israel.

The proposed public accusation

The phrase appears as part of a father’s demand that his daughter be returned on Sunday morning, in accordance with conditions he says he will stipulate and the legal decision of Rabbi Bouskila. Relatives and friends have come to offer condolences, entering with bowed heads and urging him to be strong; he feels like a mourner, though he cannot bring himself to tear his clothes for her. The comparison gives the separation the atmosphere of bereavement while leaving open a shadow of doubt about what has happened.

Against that uncertainty, the imagined placard is startlingly definite: “A shameful deed has been done in Israel!” He contemplates standing outside the other party’s gate day and night with the words displayed. The slogan would turn his grievance into a witnessed public charge, not merely a plea within the family or a legal dispute. Yet the passage also records his restraint. He warns that he might take desperate steps and hears that friends and relatives speak of more fateful action, but says that Heaven may be staying his hand and that he does not sink to the other party’s level.

Grief, mediation, and the limits of consolation

The accusation arises amid a household arranged around the rituals of consolation. His brother’s wife has left her own children to stay with him, serving soda water, savories, and black coffee, clearing ashtrays, and urging him to eat. Guests try to distract him with talk of government and public affairs. Manfred M. Zakheim calls and offers to act as an intermediary, but the father rejects mediation: the daughter must first be returned, after which the adults must face their own fates.

His brother’s response turns the family crisis into a broader language of separation, saying they should not marry into the other group and should avoid its contact and contagion. The father’s own reflections then widen into questions about biblical history, sacred geography, and whether foundational religious accounts might be allegorical or mistaken. In this setting, the placard’s appeal to Israel carries more than the force of a complaint about one household: it invokes a moral and sacred frame even as the speaker’s confidence in that frame is shaken.

The phrase’s echo in the night

After wandering the streets and watching the sunset, the father returns home under the moon. He says he has no dealings with it, fearing that his instincts might overcome him and lead him either to despair of life or to strangle the person he addresses. Alone, he drinks the brandy his brother left behind and watches television detectives pursue a criminal in Hawaii; then he abandons the program and steps onto the balcony to see whether the world is still standing.

There, the accusation returns in altered form. The moon still lays its pieces of silver over the world despite the shameful deed done in Israel. The public slogan he had imagined carrying outside the gate has become the inward measure by which he reads the night: the scenery continues, passers-by go home to their families, and the wrongdoing remains unresolved. When the street empties, he goes back inside and finds that the television story has reached a happy ending. His fleeting thought of taking his daughter to Hawaii makes that manufactured resolution an uneasy contrast to the real separation, which the phrase continues to name rather than settle.